Pioneer develops 16 layer, 400 GB read only Blu-Ray disc
According to a press release from Pioneer, they have developed a 16 layer, 400 GB read-only Blu-Ray disc. That's insane!Pioneer Corporation has succeeded in developing a 16-layer read-only
optical disc with a capacity of 400 gigabytes for the first time in the
world*1. Its per-layer capacity is 25
gigabytes, which is the same as that of a Blu-ray Disc (BD). This
multilayer technology will also be applicable to multilayer recordable
discs. This development has bolstered Pioneer's confidence in the
feasibility of a large-capacity optical disc, which is expected to
become necessary in the near future.
For multilayer optical
discs, it has been difficult to obtain clear signals from each
recording layer in a stable manner due to crosstalk from adjacent
layers and transmission loss. Utilizing the optical disc production
technology that it has developed in the DVD field, Pioneer solved these
problems by, among other things, using a disc structure that can reduce
crosstalk from adjacent layers, resulting in a 16-layer optical disc
that can playback high-quality signals from every layer.
As
for the read-out system, Pioneer achieved stability in the playback of
recorded signals by employing a wide-range spherical aberration
compensator and light-receiving element that can read out weak signals
at a high signal-to-noise ratio in the optical pick-up mechanism. Since
the optical specifications of the objective lens, such as NA (Numerical
Aperture)*2, are the same as those for the
existing BD discs, it is possible to maintain compatibility between the
new 16-layer optical disc and the BD discs.
The 16-layer
optical disc technology, capable of storing much more data than the
conventional discs on one disc, will greatly reduce the number of discs
to be used and therefore contribute to the conservation of resources.
Pioneer
will present the details of this research at the International
Symposium on Optical Memory and Optical Data Storage 2008
(ISOM/ODS2008) to be held in Hawaii from July 13.
Posted at 05:30AM Jul 08, 2008
by Kevin P McAuliffe in Astound |